Reading: 1 Peter 1-2, Psalm 33
When I was in high school the “open world” video game was coming into its own. These were games that offered enormous amounts of choice to the player. You wanted to fight your way through your encounters? You could do that. You want to talk your way through? Sure. Want to sneak around everything? Yep, you can try that. Of course, even the most open of open worlds had some fixed story line and some limits in activity. A simulated world couldn’t account for all the things a player might want to try, the way they could in the real world. Even so, it was a revolution in gaming. Those of us who were used to playing highly deterministic games were given a whole bunch of choices we never had before. It was a crazy liberation.
The first epistle of Peter is, like that of James, addressed to the diaspora, or “the scattering” of the people of God. Unlike James, Peter calls these people exiles. This is not a coincidental word. The most important event in Judaism since Moses was the exile. Identity as exiles was woven into second temple era Judaism, and so was key to the early Christian mindset as well. Christianity is predicated on the idea that Jesus is Lord, and allegiance to him is the source of new life. Jesus is currently not reigning on his throne on earth, but one day he will do so. Heaven will come to earth as Jesus takes his place as both judge and redeemer of all creation, as a consequence of which all things are made new. The most natural way for Christians in the Roman era to think of themselves was as exiles, carrying with them the spirit of the Kingdom, but not yet wholly living in it.
Peter’s entire letter is about living as an exile, and not being caught up in the ways that the world around them would solve the problem. He expounds the idea that as believers in Jesus we are given a new kind of life and a new way of interacting with the world. The believers are not playing an open world game. They have far more choices than they had before. Once, there was only way to look at the authority of the emperor: it was good or bad for you. Peter suggests a new way of looking at it: it is ordained by God for the time being, for purposes that you cannot fully know. He punishes the wicked, like the Assyrians and Babylonians in the Hebrew Scriptures. Why does God use them, and why does he use the emperor? We can never fully know, but God knows. The storyteller gets to tell the story. Our responsibility is to live out all the stuff we just read about in the letter from James. Same thing goes for marriages. Relationship in work. Masters and slaves. Children and parents. To live as a disciple of Christ in this world is to admit that we do not know all the “whys” behind suffering, but to say there is purpose and God is acting.
Peter’s instruction is right in line with the teaching of Jesus: be holy, above reproach. Overcome evil with good. It is better to suffer for doing good, if that should be God’s will, than for doing evil. This may all seem rather obvious, but consider the situation many people find themselves in even today. The temptation to hate, to strike back, to give in to solving problem in our own way, using our own definition of good and bad, is almost overwhelming. Peter is warning against the sin of Adam and Eve. He would rather the people of God scattered around the empire take joy in the new options open to them. Before allying themselves with the Kingdom of God, they were limited to responses like violence, hatred, rebellion, personal opposition. Now they have the choice to do good to those who persecute them. There is a new set of choices for opposing evil in all its forms, and it is the only one that does not co-opt us into becoming the empire ourselves.